This is driving me crazy. I've checked every setting I can think of many times over and I cannot get Acrobat to stop launching automatically when I print from Indesign using the PDF printer option. I'm running Windows 10 and have unchecked "view PDF results" under the Adobe PDF Printing Preferences. There must be another setting somewhere but for the life of me I cannot find it. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Is there a reason you are printing to PDF instead of exporting, which is the recommended method of producing PDF from InDesign? Exported PD supports a much larger feature set (like layers, transparency, interactivity).

That kept Acrobat from launching which I appreciate. There is a setting in export to deselect view pdf or something like that. Why that doesn't work with the print function.... Nevertheless, I'll sleep tonight. Thanks again.

There is a setting in export to deselect view pdf or something like that.

Yes, it's here:

…but I think that the bigger point here is that exporting to PDF is much better than printing to PDF. It would be hard to find any of the many InDesign users who frequent this forum who would advise otherwise. If you are printing to PDF because that's the way it was done in the past, you are missing out on some advantages, and I don't think you are gaining anything in return.

I work in a commercial print shop. We're one of those stuck doing things the old way...namely printing to PDF from within InDesign. In fact, this is so much a staple of what we do, that we'd be screwed if we could no longer do this.

In short, I've played around with Export, but I've encountered two issues.

1) The file size is huge. We use ID to merge addresses into postcards. From there we spit out a PDF and send that to our printer to impose (so it'll print multi-up on a sheet) and print. For example, a "print to PDF" job I tested produces a 2MB file on High Quality settings. If I do the same job using Export, that file becomes 28MB. When we print them, there's no determinable difference in print quality for the most part, AND the 2MB file prints faster. So it makes more sense for us to go with speed as time is money.

2) Using Export, we can't control the dimensions of the outputted PDF file. Again in our environment, we are provided artwork in PDF format from many sources (wacky stuff from customers) and many sizes (length/width dimensions). Using Print to PDF, there is a dialog under "setup" where we can control precisely the dimensions of the PDF output dimensions (custom paper size). In a print shop environment, this is very important. I see no equivalent for this in Export. Does anyone know how to get around this using Export?

A little background. I recently updated one PC to Windows 10 and found that I can no longer Print to PDF from ID. I can print to PDF from all other apps on this PC including all other CS6 apps. Only ID won't do it. If we can't make this work, or find a work around, we'll have to roll back this PC to Windows 7.

As we don't have to upgrade our other PCs to Windows 10, eventually, PCs die and get replaced. Get what OS those PCs will be running. So we'll have to cross this road at some point.

Sorry, if you print, you have to choose the paper size separately from what paper size is specified in the PDF file. The huge size difference has some other reasons. And I am wondering, why a printer would choose High Quality? The best PDF to print is nowadays PDF/X-4, choose that. Slightly differences in file size should not make any harm, but the difference is huge and we should know, how this file is set up to get some more conclusions.

1) The file size is huge. We use ID to merge addresses into postcards. From there we spit out a PDF and send that to our printer to impose (so it'll print multi-up on a sheet) and print.

Strange. As it happens, I'm working on a VDP postcard job with 5439 records as we speak, so I tried a test. Here's a screenshot of the files, done both ways. The ones labelled green are what I'd normally have, the others are doing it through Distiller (which printing to PDF does).

How are you imposing your files? Does your printer's RIP/controller have VDP functions? Why does the 1-up PDF file's page size matter? The Trim Box is usually the important thing.